Junjie Jiang

Hao Wang, Ziao Wang, Xiangpeng Liang et al.

Deep learning has revolutionized modern society but faces growing energy and latency constraints. Deep physical neural networks (PNNs) are interconnected computing systems that directly exploit analog dynamics for energy-efficient, ultrafast AI execution. Realizing this potential, however, requires universal training methods tailored to physical intricacies. Here, we present the Physical Information Bottleneck (PIB), a general and efficient framework that integrates information theory and local learning, enabling deep PNNs to learn under arbitrary physical dynamics. By allocating matrix-based information bottlenecks to each unit, we demonstrate supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning across electronic memristive chips and optical computing platforms. PIB also adapts to severe hardware faults and allows for parallel training via geographically distributed resources. Bypassing auxiliary digital models and contrastive measurements, PIB recasts PNN training as an intrinsic, scalable information-theoretic process compatible with diverse physical substrates.

Kuanxu Hou, Delei Kong, Junjie Jiang et al.

Traditional visual place recognition (VPR), usually using standard cameras, is easy to fail due to glare or high-speed motion. By contrast, event cameras have the advantages of low latency, high temporal resolution, and high dynamic range, which can deal with the above issues. Nevertheless, event cameras are prone to failure in weakly textured or motionless scenes, while standard cameras can still provide appearance information in this case. Thus, exploiting the complementarity of standard cameras and event cameras can effectively improve the performance of VPR algorithms. In the paper, we propose FE-Fusion-VPR, an attention-based multi-scale network architecture for VPR by fusing frames and events. First, the intensity frame and event volume are fed into the two-stream feature extraction network for shallow feature fusion. Next, the three-scale features are obtained through the multi-scale fusion network and aggregated into three sub-descriptors using the VLAD layer. Finally, the weight of each sub-descriptor is learned through the descriptor re-weighting network to obtain the final refined descriptor. Experimental results show that on the Brisbane-Event-VPR and DDD20 datasets, the Recall@1 of our FE-Fusion-VPR is 29.26% and 33.59% higher than Event-VPR and Ensemble-EventVPR, and is 7.00% and 14.15% higher than MultiRes-NetVLAD and NetVLAD. To our knowledge, this is the first end-to-end network that goes beyond the existing event-based and frame-based SOTA methods to fuse frame and events directly for VPR.

Jingxuan Wei, Siyuan Li, Yuhang Xu et al.

The construction of World Models capable of learning, simulating, and reasoning about objective physical laws constitutes a foundational challenge in the pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence. Recent advancements represented by video generation models like Sora have demonstrated the potential of data-driven scaling laws to approximate physical dynamics, while the emerging Unified Multimodal Model (UMM) offers a promising architectural paradigm for integrating perception, language, and reasoning. Despite these advances, the field still lacks a principled theoretical framework that defines the essential properties requisite for a General World Model. In this paper, we propose that a World Model must be grounded in the Trinity of Consistency: Modal Consistency as the semantic interface, Spatial Consistency as the geometric basis, and Temporal Consistency as the causal engine. Through this tripartite lens, we systematically review the evolution of multimodal learning, revealing a trajectory from loosely coupled specialized modules toward unified architectures that enable the synergistic emergence of internal world simulators. To complement this conceptual framework, we introduce CoW-Bench, a benchmark centered on multi-frame reasoning and generation scenarios. CoW-Bench evaluates both video generation models and UMMs under a unified evaluation protocol. Our work establishes a principled pathway toward general world models, clarifying both the limitations of current systems and the architectural requirements for future progress.

Wenqiang Huang, Susu Fang, Xuhang Gu et al.

Exemplified by the chemical vapor deposition growth of two-dimensional dendrites, which has potential applications in catalysis and presents a parameter-intensive, data-scarce and reaction process-complex model problem, we devise a machine intelligence-empowered framework for the full chain support of material synthesis, encompassing rapid process optimization, accurate customized synthesis, and comprehensive mechanism deciphering.First, active learning is integrated into the experimental workflow, identifying an optimal recipe for the growth of highly-branched, electrocatalytically-active ReSe2 dendrites through 60 experiments (4 iterations), which account for less than 1.3% of the numerous possible parameter combinations.Then, a prediction accuracy-guided data augmentation strategy is developed combined with a tree-based machine learning (ML) algorithm, unveiling a non-linear correlation between 5 process variables and fractal dimension (DF) of ReSe2 dendrites with only 9 experiment additions, which guides the synthesis of various user-defined DF. Finally, we construct a data-knowledge dual-driven mechanism model by integration of cross-scale characterizations, interpretable ML models, and domain knowledge in thermodynamics and kinetics, unraveling synergistic contributions of multiple process parameters to the product morphology. This work demonstrates the ML potential to transform the research paradigm and is adaptable to broader material synthesis.

Junjie Jiang, Hao Zhuang, Xinjie Huang et al.

Event cameras have the potential to revolutionize the field of robot vision, particularly in areas like stereo disparity estimation, owing to their high temporal resolution and high dynamic range. Many studies use deep learning for event camera stereo disparity estimation. However, these methods fail to fully exploit the temporal information in the event stream to acquire clear event representations. Additionally, there is room for further reduction in pixel shifts in the feature maps before constructing the cost volume. In this paper, we propose EV-MGDispNet, a novel event-based stereo disparity estimation method. Firstly, we propose an edge-aware aggregation (EAA) module, which fuses event frames and motion confidence maps to generate a novel clear event representation. Then, we propose a motion-guided attention (MGA) module, where motion confidence maps utilize deformable transformer encoders to enhance the feature map with more accurate edges. Finally, we also add a census left-right consistency loss function to enhance the left-right consistency of stereo event representation. Through conducting experiments within challenging real-world driving scenarios, we validate that our method outperforms currently known state-of-the-art methods in terms of mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean square error (RMSE) metrics.

Junjie Jiang, Zelin Wang, Manqi Zhao et al.

Inspired by Segment Anything 2, which generalizes segmentation from images to videos, we propose SAM2MOT--a novel segmentation-driven paradigm for multi-object tracking that breaks away from the conventional detection-association framework. In contrast to previous approaches that treat segmentation as auxiliary information, SAM2MOT places it at the heart of the tracking process, systematically tackling challenges like false positives and occlusions. Its effectiveness has been thoroughly validated on major MOT benchmarks. Furthermore, SAM2MOT integrates pre-trained detector, pre-trained segmentor with tracking logic into a zero-shot MOT system that requires no fine-tuning. This significantly reduces dependence on labeled data and paves the way for transitioning MOT research from task-specific solutions to general-purpose systems. Experiments on DanceTrack, UAVDT, and BDD100K show state-of-the-art results. Notably, SAM2MOT outperforms existing methods on DanceTrack by +2.1 HOTA and +4.5 IDF1, highlighting its effectiveness in MOT. Code is available at https://github.com/TripleJoy/SAM2MOT.

Mingyuan Sun, Zheng Fang, Jiaxu Wang et al.

The increasing complexity and parameter count of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Transformers pose challenges in terms of computational efficiency and resource demands. Pruning has been identified as an effective strategy to address these challenges by removing redundant elements such as neurons, channels, or connections, thereby enhancing computational efficiency without heavily compromising performance. This paper builds on the foundational work of Optimal Brain Damage (OBD) by advancing the methodology of parameter importance estimation using the Hessian matrix. Unlike previous approaches that rely on approximations, we introduce Optimal Brain Apoptosis (OBA), a novel pruning method that calculates the Hessian-vector product value directly for each parameter. By decomposing the Hessian matrix across network layers and identifying conditions under which inter-layer Hessian submatrices are non-zero, we propose a highly efficient technique for computing the second-order Taylor expansion of parameters. This approach allows for a more precise pruning process, particularly in the context of CNNs and Transformers, as validated in our experiments including VGG19, ResNet32, ResNet50, and ViT-B/16 on CIFAR10, CIFAR100 and Imagenet datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/NEU-REAL/OBA.

Suncheng Xiang, Xiaoyang Wang, Junjie Jiang et al.

Colonoscopic Polyp Re-Identification aims to match the same polyp from a large gallery with images from different views taken using different cameras, which plays an important role in the prevention and treatment of colorectal cancer in computer-aided diagnosis. However, the coarse resolution of high-level features of a specific polyp often leads to inferior results for small objects where detailed information is important. To address this challenge, we propose a novel architecture, named Gated Progressive Fusion network, to selectively fuse features from multiple levels using gates in a fully connected way for polyp ReID. On the basis of it, a gated progressive fusion strategy is introduced to achieve layer-wise refinement of semantic information through multi-level feature interactions. Experiments on standard benchmarks show the benefits of the multimodal setting over state-of-the-art unimodal ReID models, especially when combined with the specialized multimodal fusion strategy.

Bihui Yu, Xinglong Xu, Junjie Jiang et al.

A LaTeX manuscript that compiles without error is not necessarily publication-ready. The resulting PDFs frequently suffer from misplaced floats, overflowing equations, inconsistent table scaling, widow and orphan lines, and poor page balance, forcing authors into repetitive compile-inspect-edit cycles. Rule-based tools are blind to rendered visuals, operating only on source code and log files. Text-only LLMs perform open-loop text editing, unable to predict or verify the two-dimensional layout consequences of their changes. Reliable typesetting optimization therefore requires a visual closed loop with verification after every edit. We formalize this problem as Visual Typesetting Optimization (VTO), the task of transforming a compilable LaTeX paper into a visually polished, page-budget-compliant PDF through iterative visual verification and source-level revision, and introduce a five-category taxonomy of typesetting defects to guide diagnosis. We present PaperFit, a vision-in-the-loop agent that iteratively renders pages, diagnoses defects, and applies constrained repairs. To benchmark VTO, we construct PaperFit-Bench with 200 papers across 10 venue templates and 13 defect types at different difficulty. Extensive experiments show that PaperFit outperforms all baselines by a large margin, establishing that bridging the gap from compilable source to publication-ready PDF requires vision-in-the-loop optimization and that VTO constitutes a critical missing stage in the document automation pipeline.

Ning Lyu, Junjie Jiang, Lu Chang et al.

This paper proposes a structure-aware driven scheduling graph modeling method to improve the accuracy and representation capability of anomaly identification in scheduling behaviors of complex systems. The method first designs a structure-guided scheduling graph construction mechanism that integrates task execution stages, resource node states, and scheduling path information to build dynamically evolving scheduling behavior graphs, enhancing the model's ability to capture global scheduling relationships. On this basis, a multi-scale graph semantic aggregation module is introduced to achieve semantic consistency modeling of scheduling features through local adjacency semantic integration and global topology alignment, thereby strengthening the model's capability to capture abnormal features in complex scenarios such as multi-task concurrency, resource competition, and stage transitions. Experiments are conducted on a real scheduling dataset with multiple scheduling disturbance paths set to simulate different types of anomalies, including structural shifts, resource changes, and task delays. The proposed model demonstrates significant performance advantages across multiple metrics, showing a sensitive response to structural disturbances and semantic shifts. Further visualization analysis reveals that, under the combined effect of structure guidance and semantic aggregation, the scheduling behavior graph exhibits stronger anomaly separability and pattern representation, validating the effectiveness and adaptability of the method in scheduling anomaly detection tasks.

Chenming Hu, Zheng Fang, Kuanxu Hou et al.

Event cameras have been successfully applied to visual place recognition (VPR) tasks by using deep artificial neural networks (ANNs) in recent years. However, previously proposed deep ANN architectures are often unable to harness the abundant temporal information presented in event streams. In contrast, deep spiking networks exhibit more intricate spatiotemporal dynamics and are inherently well-suited to process sparse asynchronous event streams. Unfortunately, directly inputting temporal-dense event volumes into the spiking network introduces excessive time steps, resulting in prohibitively high training costs for large-scale VPR tasks. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose a novel deep spiking network architecture called Spike-EVPR for event-based VPR tasks. First, we introduce two novel event representations tailored for SNN to fully exploit the spatio-temporal information from the event streams, and reduce the video memory occupation during training as much as possible. Then, to exploit the full potential of these two representations, we construct a Bifurcated Spike Residual Encoder (BSR-Encoder) with powerful representational capabilities to better extract the high-level features from the two event representations. Next, we introduce a Shared & Specific Descriptor Extractor (SSD-Extractor). This module is designed to extract features shared between the two representations and features specific to each. Finally, we propose a Cross-Descriptor Aggregation Module (CDA-Module) that fuses the above three features to generate a refined, robust global descriptor of the scene. Our experimental results indicate the superior performance of our Spike-EVPR compared to several existing EVPR pipelines on Brisbane-Event-VPR and DDD20 datasets, with the average Recall@1 increased by 7.61% on Brisbane and 13.20% on DDD20.

Yunhao Wang, Ziting Li, Shuai Chen et al.

Aligning large-scale vision-language models (VLMs) for complex reasoning via reinforcement learning is often hampered by the limitations of existing policy optimization algorithms, such as static training schedules and the rigid, uniform clipping mechanism in Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO). In this work, we introduce Adaptive Curriculum Policy Optimization (ACPO), a novel framework that addresses these challenges through a dual-component adaptive learning strategy. First, ACPO employs a dynamic curriculum that orchestrates a principled transition from a stable, near on-policy exploration phase to an efficient, off-policy exploitation phase by progressively increasing sample reuse. Second, we propose an Advantage-Aware Adaptive Clipping (AAAC) mechanism that replaces the fixed clipping hyperparameter with dynamic, sample-wise bounds modulated by the normalized advantage of each token. This allows for more granular and robust policy updates, enabling larger gradients for high-potential samples while safeguarding against destructive ones. We conduct extensive experiments on a suite of challenging multimodal reasoning benchmarks, including MathVista, LogicVista, and MMMU-Pro. Results demonstrate that ACPO consistently outperforms strong baselines such as DAPO and PAPO, achieving state-of-the-art performance, accelerated convergence, and superior training stability.

Zuntao Liu, Hao Zhuang, Junjie Jiang et al.

Event cameras have the potential to capture continuous motion information over time and space, making them well-suited for optical flow estimation. However, most existing learning-based methods for event-based optical flow adopt frame-based techniques, ignoring the spatio-temporal characteristics of events. Additionally, these methods assume linear motion between consecutive events within the loss time window, which increases optical flow errors in long-time sequences. In this work, we observe that rich spatio-temporal information and accurate nonlinear motion between events are crucial for event-based optical flow estimation. Therefore, we propose E-NMSTFlow, a novel unsupervised event-based optical flow network focusing on long-time sequences. We propose a Spatio-Temporal Motion Feature Aware (STMFA) module and an Adaptive Motion Feature Enhancement (AMFE) module, both of which utilize rich spatio-temporal information to learn spatio-temporal data associations. Meanwhile, we propose a nonlinear motion compensation loss that utilizes the accurate nonlinear motion between events to improve the unsupervised learning of our network. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method. Remarkably, our method ranks first among unsupervised learning methods on the MVSEC and DSEC-Flow datasets. Our project page is available at https://wynelio.github.io/E-NMSTFlow.

Junjie Jiang, Zi-Gang Huang, Celso Grebogi et al.

We develop a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) based framework for model-free prediction of the occurrence of extreme events both in time ("when") and in space ("where") in nonlinear physical systems of spatial dimension two. The measurements or data are a set of two-dimensional snapshots or images. For a desired time horizon of prediction, a proper labeling scheme can be designated to enable successful training of the DCNN and subsequent prediction of extreme events in time. Given that an extreme event has been predicted to occur within the time horizon, a space-based labeling scheme can be applied to predict, within certain resolution, the location at which the event will occur. We use synthetic data from the 2D complex Ginzburg-Landau equation and empirical wind speed data of the North Atlantic ocean to demonstrate and validate our machine-learning based prediction framework. The trade-offs among the prediction horizon, spatial resolution, and accuracy are illustrated, and the detrimental effect of spatially biased occurrence of extreme event on prediction accuracy is discussed. The deep learning framework is viable for predicting extreme events in the real world.

Huawei Fan, Junjie Jiang, Chun Zhang et al.

Reservoir computing systems, a class of recurrent neural networks, have recently been exploited for model-free, data-based prediction of the state evolution of a variety of chaotic dynamical systems. The prediction horizon demonstrated has been about half dozen Lyapunov time. Is it possible to significantly extend the prediction time beyond what has been achieved so far? We articulate a scheme incorporating time-dependent but sparse data inputs into reservoir computing and demonstrate that such rare "updates" of the actual state practically enable an arbitrarily long prediction horizon for a variety of chaotic systems. A physical understanding based on the theory of temporal synchronization is developed.

Junjie Jiang, Ying-Cheng Lai

A common difficulty in applications of machine learning is the lack of any general principle for guiding the choices of key parameters of the underlying neural network. Focusing on a class of recurrent neural networks - reservoir computing systems that have recently been exploited for model-free prediction of nonlinear dynamical systems, we uncover a surprising phenomenon: the emergence of an interval in the spectral radius of the neural network in which the prediction error is minimized. In a three-dimensional representation of the error versus time and spectral radius, the interval corresponds to the bottom region of a "valley." Such a valley arises for a variety of spatiotemporal dynamical systems described by nonlinear partial differential equations, regardless of the structure and the edge-weight distribution of the underlying reservoir network. We also find that, while the particular location and size of the valley would depend on the details of the target system to be predicted, the interval tends to be larger for undirected than for directed networks. The valley phenomenon can be beneficial to the design of optimal reservoir computing, representing a small step forward in understanding these machine-learning systems.